Goldberg - Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain

O ne afternoon in the fall of 2011, during the brief flowering of Occupy Wall Street, I visited ground zero of the movement in Zuccotti Park. As I was leaving, a short, tattooed teenage boy with a pierced eyebrow shyly asked me if I would take a picture with him. Celebrities were often visiting the encampment in those days and I said I was pretty sure he had me mixed up with someone else, but the boy shook his head and answered, I know who you are. You used to work with Kurt Cobain.

I couldnt help but wonder if he had even been alive when Kurt killed himself seventeen years earlier. What was it about Kurts music that endured long enough to get through to him? Every one of us who worked with Kurt has had these kinds of experiences with fans from time to time. Its as if encountering someone who knew Kurt gets them closer to a spirit that makes them feel less alone.

Not everything about Kurts legacy is that tender, though. In death, as in life, he is full of contradictions. When I started writing this book, I typed the name Kurt Cobain into the search box on Amazon. In addition to posters, guitar picks, books, vinyl, videos, and T-shirts, there were Dark Oval Lens Kurt Cobain Inspired Nirvana Sunglasses, a Kurt Cobain fleece throw blanket, a Kurt Cobain pocket lighter, a facsimile of Kurts Washington State drivers license, a stainless steel pillbox with a picture of Kurt playing the guitar on it, and a Kurt Cobain Unplugged Action Figure. My favorite is a bumper sticker that reads, Im not talking to myself, Im talking to Kurt Cobain. If there was one that said he was speaking to me I would definitely have ordered it.

I embark on this project knowing that Kurt was a compulsive reader of his own press. He complained about rock writers who wanted to psychoanalyze him and resented it when they described his art as if it were merely a refracted commentary on his personal life, but he did hundreds of interviews to help refine the image he wanted to project.

His artistic legacy and tragic suicide created a persona that functions like a Rorschach test. Many who knew Kurt emphasize those aspects of his life that reinforce their particular notion of who they think he was. I am no exception. I owe much of my career to him and was one of his managers and a friend. In my office, I often stare at a framed photo of the two of us in which there is a sparkle in his eyes, the essence of which I keep trying to remember.

The memory thing is an issue. Ive forgotten a lot of details. Just as I was about to get in touch with Courtney Love, to help me with my recollections, I heard from her because she wanted the same kind of help from me for her memoir. Twenty-five years is a long time. None of us are getting any younger. For me, one of the biggest issues is that sometimes its hard to tell where public history ends and where personal memory begins. So many of the facts of Kurts life have been documented in books, movies, YouTube clips, boxed sets, and articles. The internet, which barely existed during Kurts life, has sites with set lists from almost every show Nirvana played, and in many cases with transcripts of the bands onstage banter between songs.

Ive been able to reconstruct some events from my files and have been helped enormously by talking to others whom I knew when I worked with Kurt. I found that many people with whom I reconnected had both large gaps in their memory and a few vivid hardwired recollections that they have retained for years as relics of both Kurts life and their own. Similarly, some periods of my own memory are a vague impressionistic mush, but I have almost cinematic clarity for a handful of moments. However, even some of these stories have become semi-mythical after years of retelling, and I found numerous instances where one persons cherished anecdote clashed with mine or with anothers.

In addition to the effect he had on millions of fans, Kurt deeply touched hundreds of people personally in his short life. Even after a quarter of a century, bitter feelings linger between some of those who were close to him early in his career and those, like me, who worked with him later; and between those who have negative feelings about Courtney and those, like me, who are fond of her. Most of the people I encountered when I worked with Kurt and Nirvana were eager to share their memories, but a few were not, because even after all this time their feelings about his life and death were still too raw.

I understand those who want to stay quiet. For the first couple of decades after his suicide I avoided books and films about Kurt. Recently, I binged on most of them. Several accounts focus on his parents divorce, his subsequent unhappy childhood, and his tenacious struggle for recognition as a musician in the Northwest during the late 1980s. Kurt did tell me at various times about his sense of abandonment by his parents and the sense of isolation he felt as a kid, but I have little to add to that historical record of his early life and I didnt seek out people whom I didnt know from my work with Kurt. He and I didnt enter each others lives until shortly before Nirvana started to work on Nevermind, the album that made them an international phenomenon when it was released in September 1991.

This is a subjective description of the time I was connected to him, the last three and a half years of his life, when Kurt Cobain did the work he is most remembered for. I view his artistry as being far more than a collection of Nirvanas greatest hits and believe that he belongs on the highest tier of the rock-and-roll hierarchy. He was also generous to other musicians and thoughtful about his role as a public figure. On a personal level he was kind to me both tangibly and in ways I cannot express.

Many of those who were closest to Kurt remain furious at him for killing himself. I respect their feelings but thats not where Im coming from. I miss him and I will always wonder if there was something I could have done to prevent his early death. Yet as far as I can tell, neither medical science nor spiritual traditions nor great philosophers understand why some people take their own lives and others do not. As Ive worked my way through the bittersweet process of remembering his life and art, the story Ive increasingly been telling myself is that his suicide was not a moral failing but the result of a mental illness that neither he nor anyone around him was able to successfully treat or cure. (I do not use the word illness the way a doctor would but as a stand-in for a force that I believe was beyond anyones control.)

I did not play music with Kurt or share his deep connection to punk rock culture, nor did I take drugs with him. However, I worked for him on the principal creative project of his life, a body of work that reinvented rock and roll in global popular culture and, for many of his fans, redefined masculinity as well.

Despite the squalor of his low points and the grotesque reality of his death, mine is a largely romantic view of Kurts creative and idealistic sides. On at least one occasion in the past, this impulse to focus on his positive legacy was tone-deaf to the grief some of his other friends experienced. I gave the final eulogy at the private funeral that Courtney pulled together after his body was found. In Nirvana: A Biography British rock journalist Everett True described his reaction to it: Danny Goldberg had given a speech at Kurts funeral service that had made me realize precisely why the singer had finally given up. This speech had no grounding in reality, no relation to any man Ive known. In it, Kurt was referred to as, An angel that came to earth in human form, as someone who was too good for this life and that was why he was only here for such a short time. Bull-fucking-shit! Kurt was as pissy and moody and belligerent and naughty and funny and dull as the rest of us.